Phone Trips

All recordings on this page are copyrighted by their respective authors and are presented in
RealAudio format. If you have a modern
web browser, you probably have all the software you need to play them.
Simply click on one of these links and it should start playing in several
seconds. If they don't work, visit www.real.com
to install the RealOne Player. Warning: the Real page will try very hard to get you to
download the pay version, which costs $9.95 PER MONTH. There is also a free version
that they hide away, so look carefully.

From the RealOne player's menu bar click Tools, then Choose Visualization. Choose the one
called "Fire" and watch its reaction to the phone noises.

I ran a telephone line for many years where the public could dial in
and listen to recordings, which I would change every few days. Sometimes
I would play phone trip recordings like the above, sometimes educational
lectures, sometimes skits that my friends and I would create, sometimes
excerpts from commercial humor records. The following are samples.

Me and my friends weren't the only ones who went on phone trips. Here's
another recording with telephone sounds from the Seattle area, and also
recordings from Great Britain. Andrew
Emmerson from London corresponded with
someone in Seattle 30 years ago and they mailed tapes to each other with narrated
telephone sounds from their respective cities. Here is the tape he
received from the guy in Seattle, but he forgot the name. If anyone can
identify this voice, please send email
and let me know. Following that is Andrew's tape.

Phone Tripper and phone phreak Evan Doorbell tells the story about how he got
interested in phones and recording phone sounds. (You can download higher
quality versions of Evan's recordings to your hard drive from the
Group Bell download page.)

Evan Doorbell was a member of Group Bell. They made the famous "Dom
Tuffy" tapes in 1973, based upon a real telco security agent they had
encountered: Tom Duffy. They decided that in retrospect the real Mr. Tuffy was a
decent guy who was just doing his job. He wasn't out to ruin
anyone's life; he just wanted the phone company to get its "revenue",
about which he was genuinely enthusiastic.

Click on the name of the file to play the lower quality version meant for
modem users. If you have a DSL line, cable modem, or other high-speed
access, click on the 64kb link. ALL
USERS can download the higher-quality versions to their hard drive from the Group
Bell download page.

Phone Tripper Frank Wilsey visited the Vintage
Telephone Equipment Museum in Seattle, WA and the New
England Museum of Telephony in North Ellsworth, Maine. Both museums
have complete, fully-restored, fully-functional, electromechanical switching
machines just like the ones you hear in the phonetrip tapes above. You really must
visit them to see and use the equipment instead of just listening to old tapes. Frank
made tapes on the history of telephone switching using sounds he recorded
inside the museums as examples.

Phone tripper Trace McCall sent us a recording he made inside a step by
step central office, and he promised to send us more. The pulse repeating
followed by the loud chattering was a CAMA trunk MF sending to the Frederick
Tandem office. At the beginning of the segment, in the background you can
make out a "snoring" sound. That's a linefinder group running a
switchman-started test.

Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay
and 35 years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like
the people in the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns
primarily for the purpose of playing with their payphones. I often
brought along my trusty Craig 212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape
recorder (this was before cassettes were popular) to record the phone
noises and narrate information about them for my friends. I don't go on
phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that this is because I
grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone tripping is that
all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays and they are
really boring.

This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders.

I first started playing with phones -- not talking on them, but playing
with the switching systems and the network -- when I was a teenager
growing up in Los Angeles. My family moved from Pacific Telephone (now
Pacific Bell) territory to General Telephone. I noticed big differences
in the noises the phone made as the dial tone came on, in between digits
as numbers were dialed, after dialing and the call was switching through,
etc. I did a lot of reading about telephone switching systems and visited
many phone company switchrooms to learn what was going on.

I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle in 1968. Seattle itself had
completely different telephone switching systems than either Pacific
Telephone or General Telephone in Los Angeles. When I started driving
around the Seattle area I noticed that many of the little towns had their
own independent phone companies and every one had different equipment. My
phone phreak friends in Los Angeles (and later in Seattle) wanted to hear
this variety of phone noises I was telling them about, so I tape recorded
by holding the microphone of the recorder against the earphones of the
payphones. (I was aware of telephone pickup coils, but they picked up too
much hum from the fluorescent lights in payphones.)

Unfortunately I wasn't into photography at the time these tapes were
made and I have no pictures of myself on a phone trip. I got the photo
at the top from a friend who also went on phone trips, but none of the
people in that picture took part in these recordings. The gentleman at
the payphone is famous and you probably heard of him.